Technical Field
The invention relates to personalized interaction between a user and a provider of information, services, and/or goods. More particularly to creating a user profile based on user data, including interaction data, and using the same for personalization. Further, the invention relates to user interactions. In particular, the invention relates to enhancing the experience of the user during user interactions.
Description of the Background Art
User profiles can be broadly defined as a collection of various attributes of a particular person or customer. The scope of a profile depends on the nature of the company using the profile and the purpose of the user profile. A simple example is a user profile in the case of a portal which contains a login ID, a password, and preferences for the various settings that are provided to a user.
Personalization refers to the specific context within which a specific task is performed and can differ drastically from one person to another. Personalization essentially identifies the context or intent of the user and customizes the product or service that is being provided with respect to such context or intent. Personally identifiable information based modification, such as including the user's name in an online recommendation, or greeting the user with a name when the user calls an interactive voice response (IVR) system are examples of personalization.
Current techniques for creating user profiles are based on tracking user activities in different mediums on the Internet. Building a user profile for each user is essential for personalized services, such as product recommendation, proactive notifications, and personalized offers. A user profile is usually developed based on transactional data and behavioral data exhibited by the user on the Web. In certain cases, data provided by third party vendors, e.g. survey based, census based, and so on, and unstructured data, such as e-mails or posts on forums, is also used to develop user profiles.
Apart from social media, Web browsing, and offline transactions, customers also interact with the firms via instant service, chats, and telephone calls. However, gathering and using all such data for actionable outcomes poses several challenges which include, inter alia, scaling.
It would be advantageous to cover all aspects of user-related data to create a user profile and thus provide an efficient personalization technique.
Currently, a user has to interact with multiple companies and/or organizations over the course of time. Such interaction may be related to customer service issues, product information, and so on, and generally involves the user having to communicate over multiple channels and/or remember user IDs associated with each company and/or organization. It is not currently possible to link user interactions effectively across multiple channels and/or multiple organizations, and then store information from these interactions in a single repository.
Thus, it would be advantageous to correlate and store all user interactions that occur across multiple channels and/or multiple organizations.
It would be further advantageous if this interaction data could be used to gain an understanding of the user, i.e. a user profile, for example to provide valuable business and analytical insights about the user including the user's intent, behavior, sentiment, and preferences and to serve the user better in a more personalized manner.